Fifty Shades Freed

Fifty Shades Freed is the third and final installment in the E L James trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey.

The book begins with Ana and Christian on their honeymoon and focuses on the continued evolvement of their relationship. Thrown in is a mysterious (or not so much) saboteur intent on destroying everything Christian loves.

This book is a whopping 579 pages. And nothing happens, repeat nothing! I cannot for the life of me figure out why this book is so long. Oh wait, James’s spends about five hundred pages giving the reader a rundown of Ana and Christian day to day life – they argue, Ana tries to talk to Christian, he sidesteps her with sex. The eighty pages left after that is spent with an outlandish plot involving Ana’s ex-boss.

I’m still stuck on the fact they are married after a long-term courtship of five weeks in which it was all roses and champagne. Oh no, must have dreamed that. It was high drama their entire dating (read sexting) span. Yet they are prepared to build a future together on that. Not as jaded as I thought after reading Fifty Shades Darker, apparently.

Ana is so worried and wrapped up in the thought that she is not enough for Christian, that he won’t be able to deny his sadist tendencies forever yet she constantly hints at “playing” and seemingly loves it.

I felt like the relationship between Christian and Ana was starting to improve in Fifty Shades Darker and now in this book, it resembles what they had in the first book. Christian’s controlling, domineering ways rear their ugly head big time in this book.  Ana seems to purposely piss him off and her antics make me want to slap her at times.

The same played out lines that were in abundance in the first two books are back and a new one gets a lot of air-time in Ana’s subconscious, or is it her Inner Goddess? She refers to Christian as her Fifty repeatedly, obnoxious. Although sadly, Laters, Baby seems to have been beaten to death and infrequently seen. Insert sad face.

There are over sixteen hundred pages in this trilogy. Each book averages over five hundred pages and not much happens in any of them. This was the worst for me in terms of redundancy; there are conversations where nothing happens, recycled conversations and meaningless chit chat. Isn’t that one of the primary writing 101 rules? These books should have been one book, there’s not enough meat in these to sustain them for sixteen hundred pages.

I would have liked to see more of Christian’s relationship with Elena (Mrs. Robinson). Instead it’s wrapped up in about two pages. So much importance was focused on their relationship and how it was the final straw in terms of Christian becoming the person he is and for it to be brushed off in two pages when I’ve had to suffer through countless pages of Ana’s Inner Goddess doing floor shows is a letdown to say the least.

If you have gotten this far in the trilogy, obviously you either love it or just want to finish what you started. I’m sorry I was curious enough to see what the hype was about, I could have been reading quality romance instead of wasting time on these books.